Abstract

In this project, we aim to investigate some fundamental techniques in creating highly interactive, distributed media environments. An example of such a media environment is a virtual city, where tens of thousands of avatars live. Each user has a virtual life and may be engaged in various activities in the virtual city through his/her avatar. Such a virtual city could be used as a test bed for various operations in urban environments, such as crisis management and emergency response.

To facilitate meaningful interactions among the users in such a media environment, the two basic QoS (quality of service) requirements on the media environment are the interactivity and consistency of the environment. Thus, the central theme of this project is to investigate how to maintain the interactivity and consistency of a large-scale, highly interactive media environment under the constraints of large network latency and huge resource demands. We have formulated three fundamental problems, namely, the server provisioning and placement problem, the zone mapping problem, and the update scheduling problem. We plan to design some computationally efficient approximation algorithms to solve these problems. In particular, algorithms adapted from the classical combinatorial optimization problems and constrained-optimization problems will be investigated.

The results of this project will open up opportunities to highly interactive distributed media environments. We do foresee the needs and potential of such media environments in the near future of the fast-growing online game industry. In particular, our results will be beneficial to game companies in Singapore, such as TQ Global. In addition, the results of this project will be beneficial to a broad range of applications, e.g., massively multi-player online games, the modeling and simulation of emergent situations such as earth quake, terrorist attacks in urban environments, etc.

Duration

December 1, 2007 – November 30, 2010

Source and Amount of Funding

This project is funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore through the Interactive and Digital Media (IDM) Programme managed by the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore. The amount of funding is S$954K.